Heiya to all of you,
when it comes to extensions, it is from a "sustainability" point of view, pretty
hard for everyone, not just
enterprise users, to assess if it is save to use or not. I think it takes quite some
experience to avoid or at
least reduce the risk of being stuck with an unmaintained extension. So yes, the
visibility of maintained
extensions should definitively be increased and vice versa.
I am thinking of some pledging system to overcome this problem: Authors should be able to
add a pledge
indicating that he or she is maintaining the extension for the current stable + the next x
MW versions.
Perhaps this is some kind of rating. A rating like good, neutral, bad does not really
convince me as well as
an "Extension of the Month" does not.
Another thing that could be improved is indeed the display of the extension's
compatibility. This is however
connected to the above mentioned idea.
I think it should also be possible for the authors to add a Flattr button and/or PayPal
button to the
extension and/or user page. Thus appreciation may be shown easily by the users of
extensions.
Cheers Karsten
Am 05.02.2013 15:53, schrieb Maria Miteva:
Hello everyone,
I want to bring up the main issues we have identified with third-party users so far to
the MW community and
the first one is extensions management. I heard from many of you that you would like to
see improvement in
extensions management on
mw.org <http://mw.org>.
Here is a summary of what I've heard so far on email and
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Third-party_MediaWiki_users_discussion :
The most important thing is to be able to immediately see the compatibility of a given
extension with MW
versions. If compatibility testing can be automated, that would be best. Additionally,
people want to have
some rating of extensions based on the quality of code, vulnerability, usefulness,etc.
Statistics like
number of downloads can be used as a market of quality as well. More visibility should be
given to good
extensions. Extensions can be separated in categories based on what they do so they can
be found easily.
Some suggest the use of SMW on
MW.org to organize extensions even though the use of SMW
on WMF websites has
been discussed and decided as a wontfix (
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8390#c24) . Also,
Yury Katkov suggested Article Feedback
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_Feedback> can be used for
rating or WikiVote could provide some of their voting systems.
Before I bring the issue up to the community, I would love to hear everybody's
feedback. Here are some
questions to consider :
1. Is extensions management a significant issue for you? Would you like to see efforts
focused on it?
2. What should extensions be rated on?
3. Who should be rating extensions?
4. How could it be implemented reusing existing resources maximally?
5. What else would be useful to have in extensions management?
6. Are there any good examples on how it's done on other platforms you would like to
point out?
7. Let me know if you would be willing to/available to help with specification,
implementation, testing,
or anything else.
Also, add any other comments/information. I want to have as much details as possible on
what people would
like to see happen.
I will be sending similar emails about other "popular" issues soon.
Mariya
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